Congreso Internacional: Música y Corpografías / International Conference: Music and Body Matters
Mahdie Mofidi (Université de Strasbourg)
The role of music and poetry in mapping gender identity in Iranian ritual theatre.
This paper will examine the role of music and poetry in the process of identifying gender roles in T’aziyeh, Iranian ritual theatre. This ritual theatre is the story of Karbala which is centered on the battle and martyrdom of Hossein and his followers at Karbala. Ta’ziyeh literally means “mourning” and is the name given to the ceremonies that mark the death of the Shiite Imam Hossein. It is also the name given to the only theatre nourished anywhere in the Islamic world, born in Iran out of these mourning ceremonies. One of the primary tasks of this ritual theatre is to engage participants emotionally in order to gradually bring them into the mental state of mourning, where they could express their grief and sorrow for the suffering of the holly persons in the battle of Karbala. For arriving to this point, music and poetry have an important role. By applying the concepts of narrative identity and feminist narratology, this article will try to analyze how music and poetry constructs the gender identity in a performance. In this particular performance, females via music and poetry reflect their beliefs and values concerning their roles and statues as females within the social structure, and also music and poetry provide them the accurate medium to perpetuate the great crusade of male. In brief, this study will focus on how the narrative potential of music and poetry helps the narrators- spatially female narrators- to imply and characterize the male and female through Karbala’s event.
